Please Check Out the Conclusion to Our Cooler Master HAF X Review Right Here
With the annual COMPUTEX event upon us, a lot of PC part manufacturers are preparing to show off some of their latest toys. Some of those have shown up leaked here and there on the web. Others have literally shown up early at our door. It’s like little magical techno-elves know to leave us an early treat before each tech show. A couple weeks ago, a group of elves huffed and puffed and hefted a huge box onto our front door. Inside it was none other than Cooler Master’s highly anticipated HAF X computer chassis and today we’ll be giving you a quick preview of this new hardcore gaming chassis!
Features and Specifications
In many ways, the HAF X is a big improvement over the already excellent original HAF 932. Starting with one of the important features, the HAF X supports standard m-ATX, ATX, EATX (Extended ATX) including some larger motherboards that support over 6 PCIE slots. This should include GIGABYTE’s latest boards that are built on the XL-ATX form factor like the recently reviewed GA-890FXA-UD7 AM3 motherboard or their super high end X58 solution, the GA-X58A-UD9. There’s even mounting support for those particularly large graphics cards with the inclusion of a GPU support bracket.
The HAF X also features a PSU shroud designed to help channel air over the PSU and supports power supplies that are around 8.5 inches in length. The chassis is also large enough to accommodate extremely large CPU coolers including Coolermaster’s own V6, V8, and massive V10. This is helped out by the large CPU cut out on the back of the motherboard tray as well.
Here some other features you’ll find inside:
- Four tool-less ROM drive slots
- Two removable (Hot Swap) hard drive trays
- Five removable tool-less hard drive trays
- 1 x 200mm top cooling fan
- 2 x 200mm (front and side panel) LED cooling fans
- 1 x 120mm back cooling fan
The chassis also supports water cooling systems. Users will be happy to know the case has rear rubber ports for tubing. You can also install a 240, 360, or 280mm radiator at the top of the chassis. However, radiators over 60mm in depth may be difficult to install properly.
While our preview unit should more or less be what you should expect from the retail edition of the HAF X when it hits the store shelves shortly. However, there may be some minor changes or improvements along the way.
What’s In The Box?
Because most of the expansion options are tool-less, there aren’t many accessories included in the case bundle. There are some handy things though that will help organize your system. What you also get are four optional wheels if you’d like to use them to roll around a very heavy system as well as a USB extension cable, 8-pin auxiliary 12V extension cable, motherboard mounting accessories, and some zip ties for tiding things up. And, yes, there will be a manual with all the sexy retail boxes shipping soon.
For a case with such great wire management potential, we would love to see some kind of Velcro straps included to replace the zip ties. These can be reused time and time again. And, they don’t cost much at all to add which would really add to the value of the accessory package and the case itself.
Creativity + Gaming = HAF X
The HAF X is a very beefy chassis from stem to stern. It’s fabricated using .8mm SGCC steel and ABS plastic. But, this only makes sense since it’s going to be subjected to many a gamer and most likely, case modders. When looking at the HAF X, an aggressive military theme comes to mind. There’s tire tread of sorts along the front, top, and bottom corners of the case. It’s reminiscent of a tire tread from a trusty HUMVee. It looks like this case can take your system off road and make it back in one piece. Let’s get a little more in depth on the following pages…
HAF X – Visual Inspection
When looking over the case, you can see that the top and front of the case seem to utilize a nice balance of mesh and solid surfaces. The front bay covers line up quite well and easily come off by pressing the end tabs inward. The extruded top conceals the two 200mm cooling fan slots which aid in the installation of some radiators.
The top front expansion bay sports pass-through SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports which is handy for attaching today’s high speed storage devices. These are blue. Directly to the right are the front audio, Firewire, eSATA, and standard USB ports. If you don’t have USB 3.0 support in your system, these will default to USB 2.0. Just above the ports are the front panel power, reset and reset buttons along with the HDD activity LED. A sliding door hides the buttons for both security and a cleaner look.
The left side case panel is has a half inch bulge in it to help increase the space behind the motherboard tray. This is useful for managing cables, particularly fatter and braided aftermarket ones that look really nice, but are too wide to fit some typical cable hiding places. As shown earlier, the right side panel sports the slick acrylic window and massive 200mm side panel LED cooling fan. While our preview unit doesn’t have it, retail models will ship with a white “HAF X” stamped across part of the window. Personally, I like not having a decal blocking my view so perhaps they’ll just include a sticker or something instead, giving us the option to sticker up or not.
On the back of the case, there are three rubber capped ports for running tubing for water cooling systems. There are also plenty of PCI slots to accommodate the latest PCI Express infested motherboards like the MSI Big Bang, GIGABYTE X58A-UD9, or ASUS P6T7. Let’s have a look at the inside now.
The Heart of the HAF X
After removing a few standard black thumb screws, both the left and right panel easily slide off. It’s here was see what the HAF X is really all about. You’ll also realize that the entire internal chassis is jet black. This always adds a cool effect if you like showing off your system.
The front of the internal chassis naturally houses the tooless, removable optical and hard drive trays. These are very easy to use. Just press the button in to lock the optical drive in place. The hard drive trays slide in and out with a simple push of the tab. We’re not entirely sure that being able to see the hot swap unit’s PCB is a good thing. You definitely don’t want to ground a USB circuit. Perhaps, a small partial cover is in order, or at least a protective sticker of some sorts.
We’re definitely happy to see the motherboard tray CPU cut out continued. This is so very handy especially among system integrators and even us tech heads who just can’t seem to leave the system alone. This simple feature has helped increase the life expectancy of the average system almost ten fold. The odds of breaking something increase when you have to keep pulling out a motherboard to install a massive CPU cooler.
Behind the motherboard tray, there’s going to be plenty of room for stowing away extra wires. Especially when combined with the relief built into the side panel. One could probably even tuck some back up PSU wires back there if necessary. Either way, there’s a lot of extra space for whatever you dare pack in to this hardcore case. Users should also be quite happy with the quality of the chassis wiring from the front panel. The cables seem decent quality and should outlast your customized system building needs.
Supplemental Restraint Systems for PSU and GPU
Cooler Master has also made some tweaks to the way the PSU and GPU are taken care of in this new chassis. Unfortunately, the PSU shroud is a bit tedious to slide forward and backwards due to the rough chassis finish as the bottom guides bind now and then. However, by sliding it to the back of the chassis, one can remove and replace the PSU shroud when installing extremely large super performance power supplies. And, given the current power requirements of nVidia’s GTX 4xx series video cards, you’re going to need one of them. Hopefully the roughness gets worked out in production.
Speaking of video cards, the VGA shroud is a bit easier to use than the PSU bracket. After removing a couple of thumb screws, you have the option of adding a 120mm cooling fan on the shroud to help cool those massive new cards. The case bundle also includes a card holder that helps support large video cards. These are very nice, yet required, features for transporting systems that have nVidia’s cards installed in SLI. The latest video cards definitely can use the support due to their massive size and weight.
Built for Liquid Cooling
That brings us to the water cooling possibilities inside the HAF X. Gamers and enthusiasts love to mod their systems. One of the biggest obstacles with any case is whether or not the chassis offers enough room to easily get creative with radiators. Fortunately, the top of the case is held in place by six tabs and can easily be removed. This is how one would mount today’s standard dual 120 or triple 120 radiators. The HAF X allows space up to 60mm in depth for these radiators.
Once we remove the cover, we also get a better look at the top 200mm cooling fan. While any fan is better than no fan, it isn’t LED, nor is it a commonly found fan that can just be ordered if you’d like to swap it out. Typically, users can just go to the very affordable Cooler Master Store to order extra parts. Hopefully, we’ll see some optional fans in stock for users who want to add or change out the fans for something more conventional or colorful.
Preliminary Thoughts
Please Check Out the Conclusion to Our Cooler Master HAF X Review Right Here
Being that this is a preview of the Cooler Master HAF X case, there are a couple things engineers could touch up along with the improvements already being made in this chassis. While we can appreciate a rugged outside case finish, it’s the inside that gets a little rough to work around specifically in regards to moving parts, namely the PSU cover. We definitely appreciate the feel of a case that has parts that just “glide” into place.
Performance tests will be left for our all out assault when we finally get our hands on the retail version of this case. However, we do expect the HAF X to do extremely well in the cooling department, just like it’s older HAF 932 brother did. We’re confident that everything we noted as being rough, will be smoothed out in the retail version of the case and we look forward to evaluating noise and cooling performance in detail.
Overall, the Cooler Master HAF X is quite an inspiring computer case. Our prediction is this will be a popular case among gamers and hardcore enthusiasts who like to show off their system. We definitely expect to see it at many LAN party sporting a whole armada of different water cooling configurations. While our preliminary thoughts are mainly positive, we’ll reserve our criticisms and detailed analysis for the final version of this product when we receive the final shipping version of this case.
The Cooler Master HAF X will be available worldwide starting June 15, 2010 and will retail for $199.99 US MSRP.